“Come see Mary Stuart with me,” I said to a friend. “It’ll be like seeing an episode of Masterpiece Theatre live.” I was right and wrong there. It’s a very English play, in that it turns on the protocol involved in executing another queen. Killing one who’s also your cousin was simply not done in polite circles.
But be warned, it’s also true that the first 15 minutes or so of ACT’s 155-minute Mary Stuart (through October 9; tickets: $37.50 and up, but pay-what-you-can day-of-performance) is largely lumbering exposition, as the Mary formerly known as the Queen of Scots (and her lady-in-waiting) recall how humiliating it’s been to have been imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth the last 19 years or so. Facing the prospect of a long night, you start looking around for cucumber sandwiches.
Things then get intriguing, then downright conspiratorial, before culminating in a fictional Heat-like face-off between the titans that will leave you with tea cup frozen in mid-air, crumpet unchewed. Kudos to director Victor Pappas for finding the accelerator and pressing down firmly on it as the night goes along.
Mary Stuart is remembered as being a hottie, so far as queens go, but her tactical impulses certainly left something to be desired. She ended up seeking protection in England from her own people, after her husband was killed under strangling circumstances and she shortly married the man widely suspected of having killed him. That was tactical error #1. Error #2 was in having claimed the right to Elizabeth’s throne before asking Elizabeth if she’d mind putting her up for a bit.
Then it’s up to you if you want to classify her alleged aiding and abetting in three separate plots to kill Elizabeth as different tactical errors, or one longer-term infringement upon hospitality.
If Mary Stuart wasn’t bad, to paraphrase Jessica Rabbit, she seems to have been drawn that way. Nonetheless, in Friedrich Schiller’s telling, first performed 211 years ago, fervent Catholic Mary is trying to put her past behind her–it’s the people who want to use her for their own ends that refuse to let her live peacefully.
If Mary is an obviously flawed human being (Anne Allgood stalks gloriously in shades of Palin-esque righteousness, while persuading you of her struggle to secure the aid of the better angels of her nature), Elizabeth puts the you-kill-her-for-me in team. The joy that Suzanne Bouchard takes in swanning around majestically in Frances Kenny’s costumes or ensconced in Robert Dahlstrom’s throne makes her a thrilling, if a teensy bit sociopathically ambivalent character. (Peter Oswald’s updating of Schiller is masterful at costuming the brute mechanics of power in still-courtly speech, while the modern-day costumes of functionaries push in the opposite direction.)
Yet while Allgood and Bouchard make the most of wearing the distorting mask of Queen, they’re also careful to let you see the women who wear it. The wounds that Mary and Elizabeth have inflicted on each other are both political and deeply emotional–there’s a tragic, how-has-it-come-to-this undertone to the play that keeps racheting up in intensity as both women wriggle in vain to escape the obvious solution. In fairness to Elizabeth’s vacillations, opinion was divided.
Elizabeth’s favorite, or “pet,” is the Earl of Leicester (R. Hamilton Wright, in marvelously mercurial form), hedges his queenly bets, calling for the head of a queen while he makes his play for her heart. Burleigh, Elizabeth’s enforcer (Peter Crook), can’t help but make Americans think of one of our leading memoirists. Sir Paulet (Allan Michael Barlow) has a Powell-like concern for the obligations of duty. The Earl of Shrewsbury (Allen Fitzpatrick) takes up perhaps the Alexander Cockburn perspective. (These are all connections you make on your own; the play is not so gauche or forward as to suggest them.)
Lastly (not really, but I can’t get to everyone), young Mortimer (Joshua Carter) may remind you that hotbloods ready to shed blood (and lose their lives) on behalf of religion are not the sole export of the Middle East.
